Cloud Data Scraping for the Assessment of Outflows from Dammed Rivers in the EU. A Case Study in South Eastern Europe

Abstract

The availability of environmentally related data is a crucial issue in simulating natural processes. The proposed research demonstrates that although currently there is a plethora of data published on the internet, by national and international official sources, their retrieval is sometimes hard to be achieved; hence smart programming tools/technologies could facilitate the automatic harvesting of these data in personal databases for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of hydrosystems that encompass hydropower schemes. The implemented methodology relies on the use of custom-made web scrapping tools to access dams’ hourly outflows in combination with water demand data in order to investigate the water balance, as modified by human intervention, in areas located downstream of dams. For this purpose, derivatives of the Electricity Market Directive and Water Framework Directive of the European Union (EU) have been regarded as web-based databases. The outcomes of the methodological approach demonstrate that the modelled net water discharges downstream—i.e., the river discharges after subtracting the water demands—are assessed with high simulation accuracy at a daily time scale. The reliability of the output estimates is further supported by the combination of measured data from gauge telemetry with the data derived by the proposed methodology. This research allows new insights, such as dams’ outflows and water demand retrieval and exploitation, into the sustainable management of water resources and contributes to the quantification of rivers’ outflows to the coastal zone.

Leveraging Multi-Source Data and Digital Technology to Support the Monitoring of Localized Water Changes in the Mekong Region

“…Consequently, the back end of the WMS often requires few lines of code for tackling such changes and is periodically updated. This issue would be solved if there was a collaborative agreement for data or service sharing with the national and or international official sources to grant direct access to their database via HTTPs or FTP [78]. Controversially, the web data scraping approach remains a topic of debate and is strictly restricted in some parts of the world, despite environmental data being publicly provided on the internet.…”

Large-Scale Hydrological Models and Transboundary River Basins

“…At the European scale, there are 72 designated transboundary basins, with Greece sharing the waters of five rivers with neighboring countries. The water governance of the countries that further belong to the European Union (EU) is strictly controlled by the well-known Water Framework Directive (WFD) and implemented through the River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs) [8]. The outputs of these strategic documents are based on water-related data and information, and expressed through environmental and water balance indexes.…”

Run-Of-River Small Hydropower Plants as Hydro-Resilience Assets against Climate Change

“…Near-real-time data on produced energy on a EU scale, including hydropower from big HPPs, are available online by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), with Skoulikaris and Krestenitis [19] proposing specific methodology for automatically retrieving energy datasets and then converting them to water discharge outflows; however, the ENTSO-E online repository does not include data from SHPPs that could further be exploited for research purposes. Various scholars have addressed issues related to the sitting and sizing of small hydropower plants [17,20,21], operation optimization techniques and optimal design [22,23], and the contribution of ROR SHPPs on covering emerging energy demands [15,24,25].…”